When bass pro Paul Elias won an FLW event on Lake Guntersville a few years back with a then-new contraption known as the "Alabama Rig", it set off a gold rush in the tackle industry that had not been seen since the plastic worm. Within a few months, almost every major company in the industry had some form of the multi-lure rig on the market, and sales ran into millions of dollars.

"We bought 80 miles of stainless steel wire to supply the demand for umbrella rigs," recalls Lawrence Taylor, spokesman for PRADCO, which owns a dozen well-known lure brands. "There's nothing like a big tournament to really get the word out to bass fishermen on a new lure or technique."

It's been that way almost since the beginning. In 1967, Tennessee lure-maker Fred Young carved a "fat" crankbait of balsa wood, added a wobbling lip: the "Big O" was born. An angler fishing it proceeded to weigh in the largest bass at a Bassmaster tournament at which a writer from Sports Illustrated was exploring the then-new concept of high-dollar bass fishing tournaments. A photo of the lure appeared in SI, and demand grew so huge that Young sold the last few hand-made models for $100 each, just before he was bought out by lure company Cotton Cordell, which molded them from plastic and sold tens of thousands of them at much lower prices. The fat plug, square-bill concept has since inspired literally dozens of imitations and remains today one of the primary lures in most anglers' tackleboxes.

Bass fishing is big business. According to the American Sportfishing Association, there are some 682,000 freshwater anglers in Alabama, most of them bass fishermen. Alabama freshwater anglers spend some $514 million on gear annually and generate some $47 million in state and local tax revenues, along with another $51 million in federal tax revenues.

Nationwide, anglers spend a billion a year on bass boats. And they like to own the boats their favorite super-star tournament angler drives.

There's no bigger stage for his sort of promotion than the Bassmaster Classic, the World Series of bass fishing, which will be fished on Lake Guntersville this year Feb. 21-23, with daily weigh-ins at Birmingham's BJCC. Fifty-six of the world's best-known bass anglers will compete for a top prize of $300,000.

It's common practice for the lure industry to supply team pro's competing in the event with new or specialized lures that will quickly be rushed into mainstream production if the angler has success with them. With literally hundreds of fishing news reporters, broadcasters and webcasters on hand for the event, it's a huge stage for publicizing a new product, and a blow-out win with a truly new lure can mean seven-figure sales for the lucky company that produces it.

When decorated pro Kevin Van Dam won the classic in the Louisiana Delta in 2011 ago with a square-billed crankbait, those lures became instant best-sellers, not only for Strike King, the company that made the winning models, but also for many other lure companies which had similar models. The lures are still selling well, though the mania that surrounded them for the months following the event has settled down.

Bottom line is that, although the pros doing the fishing have a lot riding on the event, the companies backing them have even more in terms of an explosion in business that may carry them for months or even years after the Classic.

"A win in a state or regional tournament is big, but a win at the Classic is just huge," says Lawrence Taylor of PRADCO.